Sensible antibiotic use will save lives

The World Health Organization is raising awareness of and taking action against antibiotic resistance, which it refers to as “one of the biggest threats to global health, food security and development today.”

Rewind to roughly 80 years ago, before antibiotics were widely used in medicine. Scraping your knee after a fall, undergoing minor surgery, giving birth and anything else that opened your body to infection often led to death. In the ensuing decades, we’ve benefited from medical miracles, from chemotherapy to organ transplants. But without effective antibiotics, those procedures, too, would be much more dangerous.

Back to the present. Millions of Americans get sick from antibiotic-resistant infections, and at least 23,000 die each year as a direct result. How did we go from revolutionizing medicine with the introduction of antibiotics to a future in which common infections once again kill, in about the average American lifespan? It’s simple — we overuse the drugs.

Overusing antibiotics allows bacteria to develop resistance, and then such potentially deadly bacteria can rapidly multiply and spread. Unless health professionals practice more judicious antibiotic use in human health care while we drastically reduce nontherapeutic use in food animal production, experts predict that drug-resistant infections could kill more people worldwide each year by 2050 than cancer kills today.

Sometimes doctors prescribe antibiotics to treat conditions that may not respond to them, such as those commonly caused by viruses, just in case there is a bacterial infection. Patients also might pressure their doctors to prescribe antibiotics, hoping for a quick fix. Recent studies have shown that at least 30 percent of antibiotic prescriptions in the United States are not necessary.

Although we need to reduce inappropriate antibiotic use in human health care, a more deliberate and systematic overuse of these drugs occurs in the meat industry. Approximately 70 percent of the medically important antibiotics sold in the United States are intended for use in livestock and poultry. Meat producers often give the drugs routinely to animals that aren’t sick to prevent diseases promoted by industrial farming practices, including overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. That routine use of antibiotics contributes to the rise and spread of certain drug-resistant bacteria known as “superbugs.” These bacteria can spread from farms to people in several ways, including on the meat itself, through water and soil, airborne dust and contaminated workers.

Last year, the World Health Organization called for eliminating the use of medically important antibiotics for routine disease prevention in healthy animals, hoping to stem the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria through the food system.

Unless we want antibioticresistant infections to compete with cancer for lives lost, we have no time to waste to protect the effectiveness of antibiotics.

You can help. When you’re sick, let your doctors use their clinical skills and judgment to decide whether you need an antibiotic for your illness, to lessen the chance of unnecessarily fostering resistance. You can also support food companies and meat producers that use antibiotics responsibly — only to treat sick animals or to control a verified disease outbreak.

In the last century we’ve transformed medicine, and with it, our quality of life. Antibiotics had a big role to play in that transformation, and we should do everything we can to preserve their effectiveness for us and generations to come.

Ashley Veihl is a first-year fellow with New Mexico Public Interest Research Group, an Albuquerquebased nonprofit consumeradvocacy organization dedicated to standing up to powerful special interests. Dr. Robert M. Gould is past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility in San Francisco.